The advisors say they'd rather pay a new fee to the SEC to fund more inspections than come under an SRO, with its costs and inherent conflicts of interest.
Rather than making commissions off of trades, they work on a fee only basis and are registered investment advisors with the SEC (Betterment is also an RIA).
The staff of the SEC had already required mutual funds to disclose in footnotes to the fee table, financial highlights table and financial statements, their participation in such arrangements.
Accordingly, I pulled numbers for several of the top student fee recipients, both in terms of dollars and percentage, an SEC school, a Big Ten school and Cal-Berkeley because of their recent fundraising efforts to save five sports.